Applecore 1.21

At home, cleaning out the car.

Applecore 1.20

I pulled off the road in a dark place in the middle of Utah at an exit marked Strawberry Pinnacles to watch the meteor shower. I had seen 4-5 shooting stars on the drive, but when I stopped at 12.30am the sky was so full of them it took a bright long one for me to believe my eyes again. I fell asleep by 1am and didn't wake up until 6. When I woke I ate an apple and planted the core, which had many ripe seeds, here on the side of the road where I heard a brook babbling beneath the red desert sand. The soil was moist. I noticed the land was for sale.

Applecore 1.19

At Strawberry Hot Springs, Stramboat Spring. Batters in the distance. This was the most cosmopolitan hotspring I've been to - people from Israel India Romania Britain to name a few. I didn't really connect with anybody, the crowd was overwhelming after my morning hiking alone in the Rockies. So I just looked up at the sky and the trees and then I felt more comfortable.

There were a lot of no's, maybe no food. I couldn't take it all in. But the apple was even tastier because potentially forbidden.

Bear bone, raspberries

The spine of something big was feeding these raspberries. They were particularly delicious!

View from the trail, Rocky Mountains

Applecore 1.18

On the trail to Timber Lake

Applecore 1.17

At Timber Creek campground in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Applecore1.16

Under the yogurt pot which I was using as an icebox, by an existing crabapple tree in Boulder. They seem to grow well here.

Applecore 1.15

Behind the tree...

Applecore 1.14

Applecore 1.13

Applecore 1.12

Applecore 1.11

Sunrise from tent, Nebraska

Applecore 1.10

With my rideshare Julie who helped eat the apple.

Applecore 1.9

Outside the loft building in Chicago.

Applecore 1.8

In the urban garden outside my friend Soma's loft. He planted the sunflowers here with his son a couple of years ago and they're still reseeding themselves.

Applecore 1.7

Outside a service plaza on the I90just outside Cleveland, past the toll booth.

Applecore 1.6

By an apparently disused structure behind the Mobil gas station in Friendship NY. I saw white and yellow butterflies here after eating lunch, a $3.25 subway salad with tuna.

Applecore 1.5

By my friend's house, view toward the garden, showing my tent. Those may be deer behind the tree. There were a lot of deer.

View from my tent at dusk

Ended up camping at a friends house in the Berkshires after she saw me nearby on Facebook

Coffee and carrot juice at Riverbend Cafe

Applecore 1.4

Simon's Rock, looking into the woods

Applecore 1.3

Bard College at Simon's Rock

Somebody hiked a long way for pizza

Applecore 1.2

In McCarren Park, Brooklyn. I enjoyed swimming in the free pool behind the playground and jogging around the park almost daily during my stay here.

Crabapple tree

A giant crabapple tree in a Brooklyn schoolyard.

Applecore #1.1

Apples are now in season! I bought some apples for $1 a pound at the farmers market in Brooklyn. This one was planted at Sandy Hook after a magnificent day at the beach. There were over a thousand people at Gunnison beach, so many the parking lot was full and we had to park two lots over. Most of the people were naked and completely relaxed about it, which was pretty incredible for New York (or actually New Jersey). I was encouraged when I found near the car among the elderberry trees what looked like a crabapple bush. I gave my new friend who took me to the beach an apple.

Apple Season

Apple season is here, as I'm getting ready to leave New York and drive back to California. This Roma apple was grown in New York State. It tasted very apply and ripe.

Testing 3

Upload by email instead of mms - will this tag gps location?

Testing 2 - from account associated with Google+

Testing - do these upload a location now? Which map do they go to?

technological blah

Just realized the locations of my pictures on this trip have not been mapped.  Sleuthing online suggests this was a change from iPhone 3G to iPhone 4 in a well intended effort to protect people from accidentally blogging their locations, which coincidentally was exactly what I *wanted* to do!  Now I'm playing with Google+ and making a new link to a map showing photos with locations (it seems that also perhaps picasa albums without the + doesn't do that anymore).

testing photo location

Curious about this giant tree on Long Island

So Absy took this picture of me standing in the shopping cart in Dante's backyard where I planted the last (for now) applecore Pearcore #13.

My phone overheated in Brooklyn and saved this image of itself on the camera roll.

Pearcore #12 at Mystic River, Connecticut. Was going to push through to ny last night but reached the point of exhaustion where more coffee just made me sleepier and stopped. The first motel we tried was full and the second was about to turn us away when they received a cancelation for a smoking disabled room, which they gave us at half price and was actually quite nice.

Derek Absy's step-grandfather and his wife Sarah with the painting by David A Hardy that was the cover for Visions of Space, which traveled with us all the way from his daughter Grace in California. Derek actually works as a space travel consultant - he's an aerospace engineer.

Planting pearcore #11, actually another Fuji apple, with Sarah, Absalom's step-stepgrandmother, in her garden in Damariscotta.

Pearcore #10 actually an applecore from a delicious Fuji bought in Vermont. Planted at Lake Pemaquid camping in Damariscotta Maine

Colorado Shooting

Obama called for a minute of silence on the TV, in prayer for the victims of the Colorado shooting and their families, and then our car was ready. Now we're driving over rolling New England hills in the soft clouded light, listening to Indian slide guitar (Absalom's second choice after heavy metal).

I wonder what they are saying about the shooting on the radio, and how long before the violence in the movie is linked to the violent act.

Place dependent memories

I'm waiting for a tire to be changed at Lia Honda in Albany, NY, where I took the car to be checked last time I drove across the country as well. I remembered that in 2009 when I did this it was full of people coming in to use the 'cash for clunkers' deal whereby it was hoped emissions would be curbed by having people trade in their smelly old cars in a government sponsored deal. I would probably never have thought about that if I hadn't come back here.

In my email this morning were a couple of yoga workshop offers from Todd Norian and Ann Green whom I studied with at Kripalu last time I passed through here, which I wouldn't normally have opened. I noticed they are no longer calling their workshops 'Anusara' and wonder whether they fell out with John Friend, or want to disassociate themselves from his scandal.

Now Obama is talking on the waiting room TV about the shooting in Colorado. He is rambling about family love, and how it gives our lives meaning and memories

I found pre-cored apples at Subway but they weren't too tempting so I just ate another sour apple instead.

We stopped for gas in rural NY and I wanted an apple to eat and plant but these apple-flavored licorice vines were the closest thing they had.

If I had a large truck and a garden I might be tempted to buy an Amish bandstand 

Pearcore #9 at an Ohio service stop. I'm out of pears... Need to get more, as I've been eating the unripe apples but they lack seeds.

Couchsurfing in a really cool loft in Chicago. First night in an urban area for a week.

Pearcore #7

This is the animal feed factory, which was still making sounds.  The daisies in the grass suggest it's a good place for a pear tree, I think.

Pearcore #6

Cleveland North Dakota by a closed cafe.  There must have been limited signal in the area, so these posts didn't make it to the blog until the next day.  The cafe looked permanently closed, and fairly recently so.  A restaurant the other side of the train track was also boarded up.  Sounds were still coming from the animal feed factory opposite, and people living in the area.  I wonder if the local stores closed because of competition from the nearby city, or because people don't want to congregate anymore?  I imagine all these people in their homes communing online with other people elsewhere in remote corners of the world, instead of with each other, or maybe vicariously living the life of the city through friends in LA or Tokyo.

Rotenone or Trout Poison in America

This blog was named in homage to Trout Fishing in America, a humorous book by Richard Brautigan inspired in part by his childhood in poverty in Oregon where wild trout may have occasionally provided much needed sustenance as did minnows caught in a can in an Idaho lake.

I was saddened to find Dierkes' lake in Twin Falls Idaho dirtier and more chemical than three summers ago, and populated with dead fish. Then, in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, there were signs on the way to Fairy Falls warning visitors not to fish or swim in the water because it was treated with rotenone during the 2011 summer season in an attempt to kill off non-native trout and reintroduce the local cutthroat trout. The water in the falls pond, which I'm not sure even came from a treated source, was very dead, with browned algae and no sign of Crustacea.

I looked up rotenone on Wikipedia and also found this thoughtful and informative article on its use at Yellowstone http://www.explorebigsky.com/newspost/opinion-rotenone-a-trouts-deadliest-enemy

Rotenone kills all fish, insects and crustaceans. On land it is commonly used as a pesticide even on USDA organic crops because it occurs naturally in many tropical plants and was thought to be safe for humans as it is poorly absorbed by our digestive system. It decays within hours or days on exposure to sunlight. But in water, it can last for upto 6 months.

More thoughts on this later. It's my turn to drive now...

Rotenone was I suppose thought by environmentalists and organic farmers to be 'good' because it was originally used by native Americans, perhaps in the Amazon, to harvest fish from the river, and because it comes from a natural source - plants - albeit plants that grow far away from Yellowstone.  The Yellowstone cutthroat trout was thought to be 'good' because it's native.  The brown and rainbow trout, 'evil' colonialists introduced by white Europeans for fishing were pushing the poor cutthroat out of existence.  But does this really justify killing everything, in a godlike fell swoop, to reintroduce the captive-bred natives ala Noah's arc?  Was everything else, not only trout but other fish, insects, crustaceans, potentially all the animals that eat them, the fish 6 months downstream, truly evil?  In another experiment of this kind elsewhere in the US 20% of species had not yet recovered 5 years later, and by this time I wonder what the chances are that they ever will?  Around the same time the lakes and rivers of Yellowstone were poisoned with Rotenone an article came out linking it to the incidence of Parkinson's disease in farm workers.

What is this pure native state that we desire to return to?  Absalom and I were discussing Hawaii, and whether it had any native frogs.  He made the good point that anything that came there must have caught a ride on a piece of driftwood if it didn't come with humans.  We (our species, including native Americans) have been interacting with nature here for thousands of years.  On the radio we heard 

Mako Shika

> The Sioux Indians called the badlands Mako Shika, which means land of no good. I guess that's how we ended up with badlands. But it also means they probably had no word for bad, or evil, except 'no-good'.
>
> I wonder how we came up with the concept of evil? My son Absalom said the Native Americans also had no concept of sin, and maybe bad and sin are related. Sin comes from Christianity in my opinion, but Absalom said it was more like taboo. I'm pretty sure Native Americans had taboos. I read about a tribe that had masked players as gods and spirits perform to children, and strictly prevented them from ever catching a glimpse of the masks and costumes alone until a disenchantment ritual that took place age 7 when they were shown their uncles and brothers dressing up as the spirits. But generally taboos and sin are about drawing a line through the space of behavior and desire, and othering those on the far side. Whereas good and no-good are about taking different paths in an undivided land, where you might get to your destination by turning left and then right or right and then left, maybe crossing the badlands and then coming home to tell the tale. I wonder if the concept of bad comes from dividing the land and putting up borders and fences.
>
> A giant cow on the hillside by the freeway in North Dakota turned out to be advertising a local savings bank, rather than part of the Enchanted Freeway metal sculpture display, reminding me that once people measured wealth not in money or land but in cattle. Or maybe it's meant to be a giant cow-shaped piggy-bank.
>
> The closest the Indians had to a devil was perhaps the trickster god who in the form of a raven or coyote stole from them and mocked their taboos, and yet caused laughter and brought creative diversity to the world rather than being reviled or defeated.
>
> Facts I learned about Native Americans for my clinical psychology exam: they have the highest rate of suicide, especially among adolescent boys, the highest homicide rate and the highest rate of domestic violence of all the ethnic groups. I guess this comes from not understanding land ownership when the Europeans came here and from liking alcohol too much, as well as being bullied, marginalized and othered as a relic.
>
> Or maybe there is a society of proud, happy Indians, like the cowboy bookseller, preserving their languages and traditions at some national native American poetry convention. Or maybe cowboys, too, have high rates of homicide, suicide and domestic violence, but are not a recognized ethnic group.
>
> Listening to NPR, somebody in Britain was arrested for making racist comments on a blog. They had a Canadian activist and a British reporter discussing freedom of speech. Where is the line between offending somebody and infringing their human rights? The Canadian made the point that free speech is necessary for conveying information and making an argument whereas racial slurs typically appeal to the emotions and therefore never need to be included. But I know that an emotional appeal is more likely to influence somebody's behavior and opinions than pure reason and facts. Free speech is about freedom of expression, not just about communicating facts. And how about freedom to deceive? Is that evil, or just no-good?
>
>
>

Pearcore #8

Pearcore #8 - I'm standing on the planting site taking a picture of the lake. We're about to leave Willow River SP, WI.

Camped at Willow River State Park in Wisconsin. Swam in the lake for an hour around sunset then walked back my wet body surrounded by warm air and dusk green trees. Absalom was chatting with the neighbors who shared their last burgers with us as they too leave today. Put up tent around midnight.

Cowboys

Again I'm too tired to write anything profound here, waiting for sleep to take over in Medora, North Dakota.  My son is already sleeping beside me.  He wanted to stay in a motel, he said he didn't sleep well in the tent last night and he felt nauseous and stomach-achy.  This inn is behind a bookstore that used to be a motel.  Then the couple decided to build a new inn to finance the bookstore.  We looked for books, specifically I wanted Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for my son to read, because the son in that book also has stomachache as he accompanies his dad on a roadtrip, and some more singalong music for the car, such as Beatles.  Unfortunately they only had cowboy books and cowboy music.  I recalled that earlier, when we checked in, I had noticed that the bookshop owner was dressed as a cowboy.  In fact this town is focused on cowboy iconography and even has a cowboy museum, but I wonder if they might sell more books if they expanded their range just a little.  He seemed very happy though, being a bookshop cowboy, and even his baby son was dressed in a cowboyish outfit.  When we drove through another town, in Nevada or Idaho, I noticed a sign for the National Cowboy Poetry Convention.  I guess there's an entire cowboy society out there, with everything from cowboy poets and cowboy singers to cowboy cops and cowboy criminals.  I wonder who are the Indians to these Cowboys, and whether I'm being racist just remembering that we used to play a game called Cowboys and Indians when I was a kid.

Theodore Roosevelt NP - red cliffs